


night-sky, fire in your eyes

by meritmut



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Light Dom/sub, there may be a touch more of one than the other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-16 19:17:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8114296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: They remake each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> knowing her as a man knows the mountains he has hunted,  
> naked and alone in —  
> knowing the fruits, the roots and the grasses,  
> the tastes of the streams  
> and the depths of the mosses,  
> knowing as he moves in the darkness he is also  
> resting at noon in the shade of her blood
> 
> — robert bringhurst

This is how he wakes: naked, to birdsong and the darkness and the feather-light pressure of fingertips along his spine. Coffee in the pot and the scent of her on the pillow, the aftermath of a dream like static in his skull.

He cracks open one eye and takes in the hour—not late so much as early, _really_ early, even for him, the day young enough to exist only as a blue-grey flush on the edge of the world. Sleep still clings, tries its hardest to draw him back into the dark and the unrest waiting there, but she's awake and beside him, coaxing him out of the nightmare’s shadow with a languid touch that has him trembling.

She feels it, lets out an unsteady breath and pushes herself up so she can press her mouth against the freckled skin between his scapulae: the mattress dips beneath her as she moves over him, following with lips and tongue the path her fingers had taken along his thoracic vertebrae. She plants a lazy kiss at its lower terminus while her hands mark a new path along his flanks, finding on the way a birthmark here, a mole there—she lavishes attention on them all, and the scars too; even the ones she knows he despises.

(Or maybe because she knows it, that these scars record a history he wishes more than anything he could remember, if only to forget it all again. There's a lifetime written on his skin and it’s _his_ but it isn’t, and he wants none of it, except maybe for the days that taste of her.)

"You were dreaming," she says, voice still rough with sleep.

He mumbles something, he thinks, but it’s lost in the pillow and he can’t bring himself to turn his head just yet. Natasha huffs a laugh, dropping another kiss to his shoulder as her right hand slips between his body and the sheets.

"Don't move," she tells him, low and lovely and reassuring, the press of her palm against his stomach a warm real thing to shepherd his consciousness into the light and hold it there, and as he relaxes into her caress he wonders how long it'll be before it ceases to amaze him—it, _her_ , the uncomplicated _rightness_ of this wordless surrender. How many nights and false dawns it’s taken to get to this point, where he can do it; submit, give himself over for no other reason than wanting it, because he chooses to, because it’s the woman he loves who asks, and because he knows that she can bear it and not flinch, that she can be strong enough for the both of them when he needs her to be.

(It wasn't always uncomplicated, not at first, because although he wanted—wanted _nothing_ more than to give her all of him, wanted that to be enough to make it right—all the old broken places in his mind were still there, even if he couldn’t see them, even if he was fighting to forget them, even if it was a wholly different thing to want to relinquish control of himself to Natasha because nothing else in the _world_ felt the same as that trust.)

(And so— _complicated_.)

"It's okay." It's almost a sixth sense of hers, knowing how and when he needs this, the solid whipcord-strength of her body behind him and above him, and when she takes him gently in hand  _oh—oh,_  the softness beneath that strength, the gentleness of her callused fingers in these moments when she touches him with a grace she is only herself relearning—it reaches inside him like hands and cracks him open, he’s bleeding out to the rhythm of her heartbeat at his back and her hand between his thighs and all he knows is that here is the safest place in the world, here beyond dreaming and memory and fear in the shelter of her arms, the air catches in his ribs and he sobs out _Nat_ —

Natasha, who sighs his name like they don’t call her _widow_ and _shadow_ and _death_ out there in the world, like she’s something else entirely when it’s only the two of them. She's all warmth pressed against his back and maybe it thrills him to think  _my shadow: my beloved, soul for whom mine sings_ , but maybe it’s his heart that’s breaking at the searing intimacy of her touch, no death here but the one she’s drawing out of him with the unhurried motion of her wrist and the sweep of her fingers through the soft hairs at his nape, the things she whispers into the seam of his shoulder where flesh meets phantom—things he isn't even certain are for his ears, are her own promises and prayers spoken into his skin like she could wrap him with magic as surely as she works pleasure to the point of aching-sweet pain between his legs. He’s lost, strung-out on a livewire of sensation, until the only awareness left to him is of her—her thigh parting his, the scent of her hair sliding down his throat thick as honey.

He comes with a choked sound that might be a sob, the tension in his belly going taut and unravelling in a rush of heat, languorous and sweet, and still her hands are there to carry him through it. Her fingers, buried still in his dark, silky hair; her voice when she murmurs his name again full of a love that takes his breath away, a quiet contentment that flays him to the bone and leaves him shaking in her arms, seared raw and replete all at once.

He rolls over and for one heartstopping moment her body makes up the entire ceiling of his world, and then he's reaching up, hands sinking into the star-scattered night of her to draw her down and kiss her mouth and her jaw and her nose and her eyelids, telling her in words and not so many words of what she must surely already know.

 _I'm yours_ , his heart echoing the truth of it against his ribs,  _my Natalia, I'm yours._

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leaving behind him in the sheltered places  
> glyphs meaning mineral and moonlight and mind  
> and possession and memory,  
> leaving on the outcrops signs meaning mountain  
> and sunlight and lust and rest and forgetting
> 
> — robert bringhurst

Natasha loves, in no particular order:

His eyes, clear and blue as the waters of the Volga and the wide September sky, how they glint with promise and pleasure as he mouths his way from her throat to her navel; sloppy, half-drunk kisses and the light scrape of his stubble through her shirt, his features all delight and easy adoration when he settles in the cradle of her hips.

"You’ve still got your suit on," she reminds him, nudging him with her knee because  _no shoes on the bed, James, this stuff’s Egyptian_.

"I don't care," his gaze is endlessly soft in the moonlight flooding in through the window, taking in all of her—hair half out of its braid, the shirt she sleeps in all rucked up about her waist to expose her long thighs and rounded calves, the amused, sleepy look in her eyes as she sprawls out over every square inch she can reach of  _their_  bed.

(Greedy thing. It's his shirt, too.)

And:

How he asks for nothing in return but the pressure of her fingers at his scalp, twisting into his hair to anchor him to the world and the silver-skinned planes of her body; how the focus of Natasha's entire being can narrow down to nothing more than the immediacy of his fingers curving into her, his mouth on her, the  _sound_  he makes when he dips low to taste her—a soft, happy moan that almost makes her kick him it’s so self-satisfied, though she only hooks her legs about him to draw him closer. He goes obligingly where she nudges him, following her unspoken need: her back arches clear off the mattress as his fingers find flint and tinder between her hips and when he pulls back a little he's grinning like a fool, smile loose and slick with her, and this time he laughs as she tugs on his hair to bid him back to work, one arm sliding up to pin her to the bed so she can't evade him so easily again.

And this, which threatens to stop her heart dead:

His other hand, moving from the crease of her hip to tangle with her own when her grip falters, loosens on his hair and slides down to stutter over her twitching stomach muscles, she’s the one splayed out naked beneath him but the way he curls their fingers together to guide her hand back into place is its own vulnerability, the kiss he leaves on her palm its own window into the man she loves beyond thinking.

(Hell is having arms and no one to hold, she read somewhere once, so heaven must be this: here, in the quiet, the warmth that bubbles under her breastbone at his voiceless entreaty to  _hold me, hold me, Natalia, don't let me go—_ )

(As if she ever would.)

"I don't care," he repeats, his hands trailing fire over her ribs as he moves up to slide her (his) shirt up and up and eventually—with some assistance—over her head, her beautiful hair tumbling over her naked shoulders and his wrists like copper silk. "I want you.”

His mouth finds the pulse point in her throat, tongue flicking out to taste it and she groans into him, hungry fingers fluttering along his sides. "I want—"

He falters, a shuddering breath escaping him when she shifts her hips against his, the night air cool on her limbs but his hands skimming over her body hot enough to burn, to scorch her from the outside as this aching desire sends her body up in sparks from within.

Natasha looks down the length of herself to meet his gaze, a tenderness that never fails to steal her breath away filling her chest, and this—this is what she will cherish, always.

"Anything," she murmurs, pushing her hand through his hair until she can cup the back of his head in her palm,  _you could have anything of me_.

He looks up at her from where he hovers between her knees and, oh, if his smile is the only home she will ever know then surely she can never again be lost.

"I know," he says quietly, pressing a kiss to the back of her calf as he guides it up over his shoulder,  _I know_.

 

—

 

This is what she will always remember:

 

That she loves him, with every breath, every heartbeat, every firing synapse left to her.

 

—

 

(Until, of course, she doesn't.)

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i sit down to write some good honest wholesome smut and this is what comes of it


End file.
